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On July 28, the Museum’s new exhibition Spiders Alive! will offer visitors access to the hidden worlds of arachnids, from red-kneed tarantulas and burrowing trapdoor spiders to the feared black widow and gargantuan goliath bird eater.

The Museum has a long tradition of live-animal exhibitions, from Frogs: A Chorus of Colorsto The Butterfly Conservatory.When selecting live species for shows, curators and exhibition staff must consider lighting, placement, temperature, and in some cases, an animal’s age or sleeping habits. “Animals have personalities and preferences,” says Museum Curator Darrel Frost, who oversaw the 2010 Lizards and Snakes exhibition. “There are some fascinating animals that can’t be shown because they don’t do well with people or the exhibition environment. To put them on display, you’d have to put them in an uncomfortable situation.”

Starting today, Android users will be able to find their way through the Museum, along with more than 20 other institutions, with an expansion to Google Maps for indoor locations. The new service accurately tracks a user’s location with a blue dot and guides visitors through exhibitions, to restrooms, and across various floors.

Many organisms use light to lure prey or draw attention, but scientists have found an octopus and a squid that use it to hide. The video below, created by the Museum’s Science Bulletins, shows how these deep-sea cephalopods fool their predators using bioluminescence. To learn more about the diversity of bioluminescence across the tree of life, visit the special exhibition Creatures of Light: Nature’s Bioluminescence.

A growing body of research from the fields of physical anthropology, genetics, and genomics indicates that there’s no scientific justification for the concept of race. In this podcast from last fall, Museum curators Ian Tattersall and Rob DeSalle, who recently co-authored a book on the subject entitled Race? Debunking a Scientific Myth, explain why features that we consider markers of race are actually of recent biological origin or superficial. Their book recently made the longlist for this year’s prestigious Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books, whose judges called it an “important subject ripe for discussion in a scientifically reputable way.”

An advanced telescope imaging system that started taking data last month is the first of its kind capable of spotting planets orbiting suns outside of our solar system. The collaborative set of high-tech instrumentation and software, called Project 1640, is now operating on the Hale telescope at the Palomar Observatory in California, where it uses a new starlight-suppressing technique to see dim planets and other celestial objects in the star’s neighborhood. A large portion of the imaging system was developed and tested in the Museum’s optics laboratory by Rebecca Oppenheimer, an associate curator in the Department of Astrophysics and principal investigator for the project.